The Lady Who Turned Down her Suitor – In Genoese

Around 1190 the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras composed "Domna, tant vos ai preiada", a bilingual débat: he courts in Occitan, the language of poetry; she, a Genoese lady, turns him down in the language of home: "Jujar, voi no sei corteso" – minstrel, you are no courtly man.

It is one of the very first appearances of any Italo-Romance vernacular in literature, decades before the Sicilian School. And not in a walk-on part: line after line, Genoese holds its own against the most prestigious poetic language in Europe. That lady’s voice is the literary birth certificate of Genoese.